Category Archives: Education

Going Global, Revisited

Posted by Lynne Olmos on May 29, 2019
Education, Professional Development, Teacher Leadership, Travel, Uncategorized | education, exchange, Fulbright, Morocco, travel

Last September, I wrote a blog as I was just starting a 10-week course with the Fulbright Teachers for Global Classrooms program. As I wrote that blog, I was just learning about global competencies for myself and my students. It has been eight months since then, and it feels like a lifetime. I’m not the same teacher I was at the beginning of the year. I’m better.

Rabat, Morocco

Let me explain how it happened. In December, after my 10-week course, I was assigned to a cohort destined for Morocco. It was stressful finding out that I was in the cohort scheduled to leave the earliest, as they are spread out over the spring and summer months, with Morocco being the first of the five cohorts to go. We had just over two months to prepare to be out of our classrooms for three weeks.

In February the Fulbright TGC fellows attended a symposium in Washington D.C. where we learned more about global education and met teachers from Morocco and other host countries. We had security briefings and cultural trainings in preparation for our trips. I met with my cohort face-to-face, while other cohorts for other destinations (Peru, Indonesia, Senegal, Columbia, and India) met to learn the specifics of their journeys. It was exciting and overwhelming, especially since there were only two weeks between the symposium and our departure!

During the time between the symposium and my trip, I frantically scrambled to prepare my classes for my absence and myself for this otherworldly experience. I began a dialogue via WhatsApp with my amazing host teacher, Rachid El Machehouri, an English teacher in Tangier. As he built an agenda around my interests, it became exciting and real. I was on my way to Africa to visit teachers and students.

Junior high students, Tangier

And so it was that for three weeks in March I traveled to Morocco with my Fulbright TGC cohort. The experience was life changing. Any trip abroad, especially for a fairly inexperienced traveler, can feel like the whole world is finally opening up to you. But, this was more. I got to experience classrooms and teaching in another country.

In my first blog about Global Ed, I introduced elements from ASCD’s Global Competent Learning Continuum, a rubric that measures a teacher’s global competencies. You can explore the full continuum here.

Now I would like to connect these ideas to the new teacher I am becoming. Likewise, if you are a teacher with the opportunity to bring the world into your classroom, either virtually or through your own travel experiences, I commend you. Your students are definitely better for it. Measure yourself by the same rubric. We all have room to grow.
Teacher Dispositions
1. Empathy and valuing multiple perspectives
2. Commitment to promoting equity worldwide

FEELING: I felt that I was strong in teacher dispositions from the start, but I have a whole new metric now. What can top the experience of being in a room full of Muslim students on the day of a massacre in a New Zealand mosque? Do you think I had the chance to value a different perspective from my own? When those students showed me compassion as the outsider, how did that impact my own idea of empathy? My commitment to teaching compassion and promoting equity grew tenfold.

Teacher Knowledge
3. Understanding of global conditions and current events
4. Understanding of the ways that the world is interconnected
5. Experiential understanding of multiple cultures
6. Understanding of intercultural communication

KNOWING: With travel and the learning that accompanies it, a teacher’s knowledge cannot help but grow. I learned so much about North Africa, about Muslims, and about Moroccan people. I learned about how we are all essentially alike, despite our differences. I witnessed the way a multilingual culture gracefully moves between languages, valuing linguistic diversity and encouraging communication of all types. Moroccans openly communicate verbally and nonverbally. They don’t shut out strangers. It is shocking and illuminating, as it contrasts so starkly with how Americans are often cut off from others. Continue reading →

Thrilled about a new mandate? YES!

Posted by Gretchen Cruden on May 27, 2019
Current Affairs, Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development | trauma informed

On May 9th, Governor Inslee signed a law that surely will affect our most vulnerable of students deeply. This new law reads: “Beginning in the 2020-21 school year, and every other school year thereafter, school districts must use one of the professional learning days funded under RCW 28A.150.415 to train school district staff in one or more of the following topics: Social-emotional learning, trauma-informed practices, using the model plan developed under RCW 28A.320.1271 related to recognition and response to emotional or behavioral distress, consideration of adverse childhood experiences, mental health literacy, anti-bullying strategies, or culturally sustaining practices.

I cannot believe it. This is such an incredibly positive step in the right direction! I am especially excited to see trauma-informed practices included in this new law.

Last month I wrote about the importance of teaching students self-regulation skills, especially in regards to how they would like their lives to play out. The challenging part is having the insight as a teacher into the impact of trauma on students to help these students regulate. Often their regulatory behaviors are counter-intuitive it would seem and only when you know the motivations driving them do they begin to make sense. Insights are not always enough though. You have to be able to act on this knowledge. An equally difficult aspect of helping students of trauma is to have the skills required to respond to emotionally laden situations in a healthy manner. Up until now, access to this knowledge and these skills have been limited. This is the case no long. Now, the question becomes, “Can this knowledge and these skills truly help, and if so, how?” Continue reading →

On Leveraging Technology Part Six–Essential Questions

Posted by Jeremy Voigt on April 29, 2019
Education, Education Policy, Life in the Classroom, Web/Tech

I keep trying to put down the topic of technology in the classroom, and I keep finding it impossible. Last week two things arrived in my inbox.

The first is a short article summarizing decade long research comparing reading comprehension from a screen with comprehension from paper. The conclusions were unambiguous: reading from screens harms comprehension compared to reading from paper. This is one of the first articles I’ve read in some time offering such clear conclusions:

“More evidence is in: Reading from screens harms comprehension.”

“One likely reason: Readers using screens tend to think they’re processing and understanding texts better then they actually are.”

Virginia Clinton, heading up the study says, “Reading from screens had a negative effect on reading performance relative to paper.”

and,

“There is legitimate concern that reading on paper may be better in terms of performance and efficiency.”

Reading this threw me back into memory. Sitting in the Henier auditorium, at the community college where I work part time, listening to a recent PhD graduate from the University of Washington (forgive me for forgetting her name), report her research findings on reading comprehension and technology. Her findings seemed contradictory to me. She reported finding that young readers reading from iPads comprehended the content at similar levels but were slower in reporting it because they were interested in describing the technology.

For example, if a student read a paper copy of a picture book and was asked comprehension questions they immediately discussed the content. If a student read the same picture book from an iPad and was asked the same comprehension questions, they discussed what buttons they pressed, and the interactions with technology before they discussed content. The researcher presenting dismissed the delay, but it stood out as alarming to me. As a parent and as a teacher efficiency is important to me. My top rules for technology in my personal life and in my classrooms are:

It must add to life
It must not distract from life

Continue reading →

On Leveraging Technology—part five: a sorting

Posted by Jeremy Voigt on March 29, 2019
Education, Education Policy, Professional Development, Web/Tech

On Leveraging Technology—part five: a sorting

When I started writing about technology in the classroom back in October I began with these central questions:

How do we teach mindful use of technology to students who are already immersed in technology?
How do I deal with the inherent assumptions in the previous question that imply such immersion is negative?
Is such immersion negative?

A host of other questions has arisen from my explorations.

Context: My district decided against one-to-one technology adoption after passing our technology levy. The district my children attended adopted one-to-one. The comparison has been interesting. Of course, the comparison is not perfect. I’m a teacher in one district, and a parent in another. Obviously different perspectives. I’ve also made some clear decisions about my kids and technology, and technology in my personal life, which I laid out in the first post.

Here I am at the end of March, the longest month, and where am I really with answering these questions?

Continue reading →

Teaching Builds Character!

Posted by Gretchen Cruden on March 26, 2019
Education, Education Policy, Elementary, Life in the Classroom, Mentoring, Social Issues

It takes a little knowledge to dig a little deeper sometimes. This month, I am hitting the knowledge. Next month – I am digging a little deeper. What am I talking about? Character education! Let’s first get a little history…

A triad of men formed the genesis of what is called character education today.

Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) was fascinated with both his own moral character and those of his fellow Americans. At the age of twenty, he set out to develop his own moral character in a systematic way and devised a way to evaluate how well he was adhering to his top thirteen traits of character. He wrote about these same traits as being excellent tools to derive moral answers to the questions of every day life for children. Some of these same traits (such as resolution, industry and justice) form the backbone of today’s character education programs. I wonder what app he would develop in today’s world to self-monitor his character?

Horace Mann (1796-1859) did not think the schools of his era were lacking in the ability to teach academics, but was lacking in something far more imperative to society; moral reasoning. He was of the mind education should not only include moral instruction, but that it should be mandatory. Mann’s home state of Massachusetts became the first state to require that children attend classes in 1852. The law stated every child must attend school to learn read and do math. If parents refused, they were fined large sums of money and if they still refused, their children were removed from their homes and their parental rights were severed. Wow-times have changed! Part of this severity was due to the importance Mann placed in having all children raised with having been taught moral reasoning.

William McGuffey (1800-1873) had an equally strong impact in the formation of early learning. He became a teacher at the wise, old age of fourteen. He began to see the importance of have a unified approach in schools to moral learning and developed the most popular curriculum in history; the McGuffey Readers. These schoolbooks were laden with Biblical stories and moral lessons. In this way, the prevailing social norms of the time were established for the students. These lessons became the foundation of moral development for early American children for many generations.

Continue reading →

What My Mom Taught Me About Teaching

Posted by Jeremy Voigt on January 30, 2019
Education, Life in the Classroom, Social Issues

On January 14th 2019 my mother died. I sat with her for nearly eighteen hours, and was there when her breathing slowed and stopped.

My mother taught in Seattle public schools for a decade before becoming a stay at home mom. Some of my earliest memories are of her classroom and the daycare adjacent to her classroom. There was a door with a window between us. A green cot I lay on, but never slept on for nap time. A paper mache T-Rex. It seemed huge. The drawer she said her purse was stolen from. A woman I was not related to, but we called Aunt. Dusty light in a 60’s style classroom.

As a stay at home mom, my mom thrived. She was the type that made things happen: lunches, events, or after school programs. Our county didn’t have a rec sports league so she co-founded one. She taught me to read. Put books in my hands. Drove me everywhere. Music lessons. Friends. Ballparks. Yelled louder than any parent in any baseball stands anywhere. Ever. A growl of a cheer.

She had a huge social network. And she was kind to everyone. My town was small enough, at the time, most people knew her, and therefore most people knew me in any given situation. I hated that fact as a kid. I’m a classic introvert preferring to be left alone often, and she a classic extrovert—thriving on the social network. But mom taught me to be kind, or at least civil, to everyone I met, no matter what. And to respect kindness as the highest form of human interaction.

My mother also was an alcoholic. She would not like me saying this. She would say I’m not preserving her dignity. And from her perspective, she’s right. But in my early life my mom taught me to be kind, she taught me to be honest, and she taught me to pay attention to language. And in her later life she taught me to practice these things under strenuous circumstances. I’ve learned over the years that accurately naming something is a kindness. I would argue acknowledging my mom’s disease, and loving her are one act. I would argue putting the truth on the table under bright light takes away its power. Alcoholism gets between people, naming it (without judgement) puts it to the side.

She struggled with that, and it is ok, because it is hard. She could not untangle the connotation of judgement from the word alcoholic. Perhaps that is a perspective from her personality or from her generation, either way it does not matter anymore. We disagreed on this until the day of her death. But what I’ve found over the last few weeks is that the people who love her most, knew and in their own ways acknowledged her disease and loved her all at once. Life is supposed to be hard. If it were easy there would be nothing to do and we’d have no sense of value. And the lesson of naming something, no matter how difficult, proved just as powerful as my mom’s early lessons about kindness.

The day after my mom died, I went to work. I started my AP Language class with a colleague’s student teacher observing, something planned weeks ago. I tried to teach. I started talking about sentences, periodic and cumulative sentences. I thought I mixed them up. Fumbled through definitions. I couldn’t focus. I started sweating. I have never felt so lost in front of students. Even in my first years of teaching. So, I stopped.

I told my students that we knew each other too well after four months, and I could not continue without explaining why I was a mess. I told them my mom died. A subtle shock wave moved through the room. They went quiet. I’ve been teaching for fifteen years and I really believe the single most important thing a teacher can do is be authentic. I told them I was ok, and would be gone the rest of the week. We were quiet as a group for a few beats. That morning I held back because it did not seem appropriate to burden my students with my grief. But standing before them, I just could not fake it at that level. They saw right through the façade, because I’d worked hard to be vulnerable and real and together all year and when I wasn’t everything was wrong. Naming the reality put everything into the fluorescent classroom light. I stopped sweating. We could move on. They said they were sorry with murmurs, with their eyes, and with their awkward teenage silences. It was amazing.

The Wheels on the Bus

Posted by Shari Conditt on January 5, 2019
Education, Professional Development

I’ve spent sixteen years teaching for my current district and until recently I couldn’t have told you what road or geographic landmark determines whether a student attends my school or the neighboring district’s high school. I did know that our district is large geographically. We have a “remote but necessary” elementary school in our district that serves 40 students who live upriver.

We use a variety of terms to describe geographic areas in our school community. Upriver is a pretty common term used to describe the area due east of our community that parallels the Lewis River. I first heard this term when I started teaching in the district. When we received our first yearly snow, I was told that the kids who live upriver needed to go home. I didn’t really understand but later, during the summer, I went hiking and discovered that upriver includes a significant elevation gain that approaches the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and Mt. St. Helens. The bottoms is another area I’ve often heard students reference. I really had no sense of where that was nor did I ever find myself in a position to go explore the area. I’d ask and folks would point in a direction but it never made much sense to me. There was talk amongst staff that students would go hang out by the bottoms. I also knew that some of my students lived over there (wherever it was). I came to learn that this area is close to the Columbia River. There are a few parks down there and a road that runs along it that seems a bit too narrow for driving high speeds. It’s also host to some local farms and farm families.

Over the past few years I’ve been really thinking about what it means to “know my students.” Like many, I do interest inventories at the beginning of the year to diagnose learning styles. I learn about likes and dislikes, habits, playlists, and have my students write me a letter so I can get a sense of their voice. Last year, I decided that I wasn’t okay with the fact that I could go a class period without talking to each student, so I positioned myself in front of my classroom door every class period before students walked in so that I could at least greet them coming into class. I find these interactions encouraging as they’ve led to other, deeper conversations about issues going on at home, struggles students are having with peers, or challenges students are facing in my class. But at the end of last year, I still found myself wanting to learn more about the community my students live in.

Because of my work as a part time instructional coach I assist in the planning for site based professional development experiences. I asked our principal if he would be willing to carve out time before the school year to take our staff on a “field trip” to see our community. I wanted to know where the bottoms are and what conditions were like for our students. I wanted to see the boundary lines so I could better understand our students and our district. My principal figured out the “how” and the route, and when we came back for our August trainings, our staff loaded into a school bus one morning to take a tour. The bus took us to places that aren’t on the main roads or that I pass as I drive to work each day. We went past the subsidized housing units, the trailer parks, and piled up decommissioned railroad cars that families live in near the bottoms. We drove past the camp ground that lacks running water that is home to some of our students. The bus driver took us up roads that quickly climb elevation to some of the most beautiful homes in our community with expansive and breathtaking views of valleys and rivers (Note: How do our bus drivers turn the bus around up there?). While the tour was guided by my principal, staff who grew up in town added information to help round out the experience. On that day we saw poverty and wealth and my eyes were opened to the stark contrast between what home looks like for so many of my students.

That trip was nearly four months ago and it still resonates with me. I find myself thinking about where my students live and what their lives must be like in those apartments, houses, trailers, and tents. I’m really seeing my students. I find myself patient with the student who couldn’t finish her work last night. I know now that she doesn’t have reliable electricity.

New Year’s Resolutions for a Busy Teacher

Posted by Lynne Olmos on December 31, 2018
Education, Life in the Classroom, Professional Development, Teacher Leadership, Uncategorized

This blog is brought to you by boxes of Christmas decorations, a beleaguered faux Canadian Pine, and the heavenly aroma of black-eyed peas and pork.

New Year’s Resolution #1: Stick to Worthwhile Tasks and Activities

The new year is upon us, happening too fast, as usual. Just as we get used to the schedule of a Winter Break, we are trying to get a mountain of tasks done before school starts up in a few short days. Where does the time go?

That’s really the gist of it, isn’t it? Where does time go? As teachers, we are always scrambling to fit all the learning we can between two bells. We have to cram all the planning, copying, and bathroom breaks into those all too few precious moments, and most of us take the work home, too. We are always squeezing too much into too little time. The struggle is to make all of our time, our students and our own personal time, worthwhile.

I resolve to ensure that my students do not suffer through meaningless busy work.

And, because I am important, too, I will give myself meaningful and worthwhile tasks, too. I will let go of the “busy work” that wastes time, and I will focus on what makes my life more complete. I want to always be able to say, “it’s worth my time.”

New Year’s Resolution #2: Take Time to Celebrate

As I pack away my Christmas décor, removing the sparkle and glow from our home, carefully tucking away old ornaments and our faux Canadian pine, I am feeling sentimental. It all goes by so fast. Not just the holiday, but the year…everything.

In the gloom of winter, we create an artificial shine to remind us of the celebration of all that we love. It’s nice, but it’s fleeting. In light of this, I resolve to make sure that those who are precious to me know that they are. I want to openly value my family and friends, and my students, too.

I resolve to tell my students what is wonderful about each and every one of them.

Likewise, I want to joyfully express my love of learning, of literature, of history and of theater. I want to share what is precious to me with those who I value and hold dear. We should never lose the sparkle and glow that we so intentionally celebrate this time of year. We need to spread it out thouogh the year with enthusiasm.

New Year’s Resolution #3: Expect Great Things in the Future

As I write this, my home is filled with the savory aroma of black-eyed peas, collard greens, and pork. It’s a tradition in our family, and in many places around the country, to eat black-eyed peas on New Year’s. It’s for luck and prosperity in the new year. Wikipedia confirms it: “The peas, since they swell when cooked, symbolize prosperity; the greens symbolize money; the pork, because pigs root forward when foraging, represents positive motion.” It’s a lovely smell, and it brings back a lot of memories. But this year, I am really looking forward to so much more. I have a lot I want to accomplish, so bring on those black-eyed peas!

This year, I will be going on an international field experience with Fulbright’s Teachers for Global Classrooms. Last week I found out that my assignment is in Morocco during March. That is big news and such a trip can only be life changing. I am overwhelmed and excited, to be sure.

However, this year could be amazing for so many other reasons, and I don’t want to lose sight of any of it. I have a grandson to enjoy, a young horse to ride, an amazing family. And, not to be forgotten, I have some incredible students in my life right now. I want to plan for the best possible outcomes for us all.

Luck would be nice, but I am setting my expectations very high.

I resolve to expect great things, from myself and my students.

So, let’s break it down. Here is Mrs. Olmos’s advice for a great 2019, for herself, mainly. However, I think these goals/resolutions could work for any teacher.

Stick to what is most worthwhile.
Celebrate all the good stuff.
Have outrageous expectations.

And have a Happy New Year!

Stories From School

Practice Meets Policy

Category Archives: Education

Going Global, Revisited

Thrilled about a new mandate? YES!

On Leveraging Technology Part Six–Essential Questions

On Leveraging Technology—part five: a sorting

The Wheels on the Bus

New Year’s Resolutions for a Busy Teacher